The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  Or they might discuss another favorite subject among Lun Dayeh men: hunting. How many wild pigs had one longhouse chief's son and his friends brought home from the hunt last year? How many days had another longhouse hunting party been away and come back with nothing but one small mouse deer with almost no meat on him? Tales of hunts in the days of their own youth could spin out for many hours among this highly competitive group. Most of the leaders prided themselves on being good storytellers and some were brilliant animal impersonators. They all loved a good laugh at one another's expense. But Makahanap persisted. After each digression he would tactfully try to return the elders to the subject at hand. After just two days—a triumph of speed—he was rewarded with the group's decision: The lun mebala would do whatever was necessary to protect the Americans.

  In that case, the district officer insisted, lowering his voice for emphasis, they would all have to follow his orders exactly and execute his instructions punctually. He would help as much as he could with supplying the Americans with food, firewood and other necessities, but the fugitives must be kept hidden. And, he emphasized, dropping his voice still further, the whole operation must be kept secret. Only after the headmen had agreed to this was Makahanap ready to face the Americans.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Good-bye, Mister"

  When Phil and Dan awoke in the longhouse at Long Kasurun, they felt sore from sleeping on a hardwood floor cushioned only by a thin grass mat. They could hear a cock crowing below as they stretched and looked at the unblinking hosts who still surrounded them. They did not realize that the men of the longhouse had been up for a long time and had already eaten breakfast.

  Phil and Dan were given big servings of rice again and, being hungrier than they were the night before, made a respectable dent in the white mound wrapped in the packet of leaves in front of them. Over breakfast they tried to convey to the Dayaks that they wanted to go back to the plane wreck. Although the Aussies had told them to stay away from a crash site, the airmen were hoping to pick up the trail of some of their crewmates. They must have felt they looked silly doing arm-and-hand imitations of an airplane crashing, but the Dayaks seemed to understand. Soon Phil and Dan were following the Dayaks out of the longhouse to the riverbank. They walked single file upstream along the muddy banks until the river was merely a creek.

  Phil and Dan were young and fit, but they were no match for their barefoot guides in speed or endurance. Leeches covered the airmen's legs and crawled up inside their underpants, leaving trails of blood that showed through their trousers. The Dayaks also had leeches on their legs but showed no inclination to slow down because of them. Phil and Dan were wearing G.I. boots that slipped in the mud, making it difficult to go uphill and even harder to keep from sliding downhill. Phil was feeling the familiar pain of his shin splints. And he and Dan were still burdened by the items they had collected from the wreck, which they did not want to hand over to the Dayaks.

  But at least it would be as hard for the Japanese following them, the airmen thought. And they realized they had another advantage. They were tall enough, especially Phil, to see farther above the dense brush than the Japanese probably could. Not that lack of visibility seemed to slow down the Dayaks. They were the best walkers the flyers had ever come across. Phil and Dan did not know that their Lun Dayeh hosts were renowned throughout the island as jungle walkers and mountain climbers, but they did notice how strong their leg and thigh muscles were.

  On the way to the crash site, Phil, Dan and their guides came across a solidly built lean-to. The Dayaks gestured to Phil and Dan to go inside. There, astonishingly, were Jim Knoch, their flight engineer, and Eddy Haviland, the young nose-turret gunner whom Phil had helped out of the nose wheel hatch. For a brief moment, the Americans could almost forget their fear of the Japanese and their native guides' headhunting proclivities. In less than twenty-four hours, all the men who had jumped from the front of the plane were together again—except for Tom Coberly, for whom they had little hope. They did not yet know what had happened to those crewmates who had parachuted from the back of the plane: John Nelson, Franny Harrington, Tom Capin and Elmer Philipps. But at least they could rejoice that half of the plane's surviving crew was reunited.

  For an hour or more the airmen stayed in the hut and caught up with what had happened since they left the plane. Eddy, half blinded by the Plexiglas that had entered his eye, had fallen first into a tree where his parachute had caught, then had dropped a hundred or more feet to the ground after the chute came loose. He said some Dayaks had found him half limping, half crawling, protecting his almost certainly broken ribs, and had carried him on a litter to the hut where he found Jim, who was in good shape.

  Jim took up the story. He, too, had landed in a tree and had half climbed, half slithered his way down to the ground, where the Dayaks had found him and brought him to the hut. Then, other Dayaks had appeared carrying a litter and set Eddy down on the floor next to him. When the two airmen realized they were hungry and brought their fingers to their mouths, the Dayaks had reached into the small reed baskets on their backs and brought out neatly folded palm-leaf parcels containing sticky white rice. The rice tasted like library paste, but Jim and Eddy had been so hungry that it hardly mattered.

  The airmen would learn that the Dayaks had different kinds of huts they called sulap. One type was a lean-to that could be quickly thrown together to shelter three or four hunters for a night. A layer or two of sticks kept the hut floor off the ever-moist ground, and taller sticks or tree branches at the four corners held up a few layers of big palm leaves, which kept the rain out. But other sulaps, made of bamboo and reeds, were a bit bigger and were semipermanent, built on stilts. A family would stay in such a hut throughout the weeks of the rice harvest if the fields were too far from the longhouse. The airmen were now inside a hut of the more permanent type. Rough-hewn and small as it was, its roof was high and it kept the men fairly cool even after the sun came out from behind the usual morning cloud cover.

  Once the airmen had exchanged their news, Phil took out the first-aid kit he had recovered from the plane wreck and began to apply some ointment to Eddy's eye. It did not seem to help much, but they had better luck with the bandages Phil made from torn strips of parachute silk, which he used to bind up Eddy's ribs. Eddy, a smart, soft-spoken and stoic young man from suburban Maryland, found he could hobble alongside the others as they continued their walk to the plane wreck.

  The next discovery was no cause for rejoicing. Hanging from parachute lines entangled in the upper branches of a tall tree was the battered body of Tom Coberly. The parachute was still in its cover and the pilot's clothes and body showed the effects of having crashed through the jungle canopy. Perhaps the parachute had malfunctioned or maybe Coberly, in his morphined state, had not been able to pull the cord. It was a shock for the airmen to see their leader like that, but it was not really a surprise. They knew there was nothing they could do for Tom now. The Dayaks made signs that seemed to mean that they would bury the body. Phil gestured that he wanted them to bring him back the parachute when they were done.

  The survivors were submerged in contradictory emotions as they absorbed the fact of their pilot's death. They were genuinely sad and shocked. But they were also full of the rush of adrenaline that always seemed to follow the loss of a buddy in combat. Here they were, perhaps in grave danger, but at least they were still alive.

  Soon the party reached the plane's fuselage. The flyers sat quietly a moment to contemplate the total wreck that the plane now was. Airmen generally feel that their planes are living things, but this one was clearly stone-cold dead. Fred's and Jerry's bodies were gone: The Dayaks presumably had taken them away for burial. They all began poking through the debris to see if there was anything left worth saving, but Phil and Dan had found it all. The Dayaks urged them to move on, though they could not convey precisely where they meant to take the airmen next. The Yanks stood up wearily, as aware as the Dayaks were that the Japanese a
lready might be looking for the fallen plane.

  Their guides led them on a new path, and the airmen found it increasingly hard going as they tried to keep up. Walking through the jungle was not at all like strolling through a forest back home. Dark green and tan foliage surrounded them, blocking the view in every direction beyond a yard or two. Close-up, there seemed to be nothing but leaves, vines and stems, though the screams of a million insects assaulted their ears from all direction. The airmen had always heard that jungles teemed with life. If so, little of that life was visible in this one.

  Pooling their limited knowledge of Borneo, the airmen were just as glad they weren't running across any animal life. Dan remembered from the National Geographic articles that the island was home to a great variety of snakes, from giant pythons and big king cobras to the small but even more deadly banded kraits, similar to the coral snakes of the Southwest. Somebody else, maybe Eddy—who also was a reader—remembered learning about honey bears with slashing claws nearly a foot long. The airmen also would have been half expecting to come across orangutans, such as they had seen in zoos, apes as big and strong as a man. Wary as these thoughts made them, the airmen pressed forward as best they could. Dan and Jim, glad to be together again, could walk with relative ease. But Phil was feeling increasing pain from his shin splints and Eddy, still blind in one eye and in great pain from his ribs, was breathless with the effort of moving fast enough to keep the Dayaks' slim backs in view.

  The airmen were hauling their weapons and the items salvaged from the plane, including the one-man inflatable raft. Phil and Dan also still had their chutes; they wanted to be ready to spread the white silk out and signal their presence to friendly aircraft, if any appeared overhead.

  Eventually the guides paused; they had reached their destination: a bigger hut on a hilltop in the middle of a burnt-off rice field. The Dayaks gave the men a few days' supply of raw rice and firewood and then slipped off into the jungle.

  That evening was the airmen's first one spent trying to cook for themselves. They saw the light from torches in the valley and felt their own isolation. It was remarkable how far away the light from a fire could be seen. Afraid to draw attention to themselves from unfriendly men or beasts, the four barely spoke above a whisper. Using water from a nearby stream, they tried to cook the rice as fast as possible to prevent their fire being noticed. Their efforts were, in Dan's words, "pathetic." They had to force down the gray, soupy gruel. After dinner, time passed slowly as they lay in the dark. The damp air grew almost cold.

  "No sign of rescue," Phil wrote in his diary the next day. "Natives very friendly. Food plentiful. Ed's eye a little better, ribs same. When Ed can move, we plan to travel river to coast."

  Looking at his silk map of Borneo, Phil thought their best plan would be to go north to Kudat, on the northern tip of Borneo, to find one of the submarines that the briefer had said were supposed to be on the lookout for downed airmen. If they could not reach the Philippines by sub, maybe they could get there by one of the Black Cats (Catalina flying boats) that the briefers had said were based in several locations along Borneo's north coast.

  They spent another long day in the hut, resting up and thinking of how to get back to their base. The following day, November 19, was notable for the sound of a plane overhead, but they could not see it well enough to tell if it was one of theirs or the enemy's. On November 20, another plane flew overhead: a B-24! It passed almost directly over them, so low that Phil thought anyone standing in the waist window would have seen them. The men scrambled to spread out their parachutes to make a big patch visible from the air, but no one onboard seemed to notice the splash of white or the men's frantic shouts and wild gestures. The plane passed from view; Phil and the others quietly refolded the chutes, hoping they had not drawn the attention of the Japanese or their collaborators.

  A welcome break in their isolation came later that day. An old man from the longhouse where Phil and Dan had stayed the first night stopped by to see them. The man, like the other Dayaks they had met, was nearly naked, except for a loincloth. But today he also wore a black oval felt hat. It was as if Charlie Chaplin had come on the scene. Inside the hat was a newspaper. The Dayak let them examine it. It was a copy of the Los Angeles Evening News for February 19, 1939. It was their first new reading material since dropping from their plane and they read it hungrily. But how did their visitor happen to have it? The airmen shook their heads at yet another bizarre event in a world that had changed totally for them after they landed in the middle of Borneo.

  Five days after their drop into the jungle found Phil, Dan, Eddy, Jim and their Dayak guides—who had returned with more food—trying to get help for their journey north to the coast at Kudat. Phil had found that some local words were like the Malay words on the survival kit's word list, and had managed to understand that the nearest town not in Japanese hands was called Long Berang. From what he could make out, it was not too far away, perhaps a day's travel downriver by dugout canoe.

  Although the airmen were now letting the Dayaks help carry their things, the trek was still an ordeal. When they reached the river, Phil tried to figure out how to get hold of a canoe. He and Dan remembered that at the first shelter, with the green banana stalk, they had seen long, carved pieces of dugout tree trunks leaning against the walls of the hut. They told Jim and Eddy their idea and then managed by acting out a kind of charade to convey to the Dayaks their wish to go back to the first sulap.

  It was a hard walk but the guides led them back to the right place; the hulls were still there and the airmen began to bargain with the Dayaks for one of the dugouts. But bargaining was something the Dayaks had done all their lives and the young Americans were greenhorns by comparison. Over the next hour or two, while a group of Dayaks from the rice fields gathered to watch, the airmen handed over fishhooks, the collapsible machete and much of the remaining contents of their survival kits. For good measure, Eddy threw in his Loyola High School ring from Govans, Maryland. Eventually, a deal was struck.

  Next, they and their Dayak guides tried out the vessel on the river, but the trial set the Dayaks to laughing. The airmen had bought only the bottom piece of the longboat. Without the upper sides to keep the water from swamping it, their hull barely stayed afloat. The exuberance the airmen had felt doing something that might lead to their getting out of Borneo faded. They were hot, tired and itchy from sand flies and gnats. They had traded away just about everything they were willing to give up for this "boat" that was a joke. Still, there seemed nothing to do but keep to their plan of paddling to Long Berang and hope for the best. They bunked down in the sulap for the night.

  The next day, the airmen set out, along with two Dayak paddlers who were "laughing up a storm" as Dan recalls. Within a quarter of an hour, as the Yanks' half boat wobbled precariously around a bend in the river, a proper dugout canoe came toward them with its elegant sidepieces in place. Despite going against the current, this oncoming boat was moving briskly, paddled by a half dozen experts. There were a few Dayaks as passengers, but the place of honor was occupied by a man dressed in a dirty store-bought white shirt and wide-legged cotton shorts—the first set of Western-style clothes the airmen had seen on anyone in Borneo. As the boat drew closer, they could see that the man in the white shirt had curly black hair—not straight, like the Dayaks'—and pale tan skin. With his big sad brown eyes and a more protuberant nose than was typical for a Bornean, he looked like he might be Malay or Filipino, or possibly even Eurasian.

  "Good-bye, mister!" they heard him shout.

  It was William Makahanap, greeting the Yanks with one of the few English phrases he knew.

  Makahanap, making his way upriver from Long Gavit, had seen the Americans from a distance and all he could think was that these were not soldiers, they were boys. As tall as they were, they did not look any older than Christiaan—and were probably not as mature. His heart sank. He had to wonder: Would they be able and willing to follow his orders? Could he trust
them not to do something foolish that would cost them all their lives?

  Makahanap was unused to acting bossy. It was not his style, and the Dayaks recognized his authority without his having to make a display of it. But he thought he ought to appear as masterful as possible to these white men. Once the two boats drew close enough, he immediately took charge, telling the Dayaks to moor the half boat and bring everyone to the Long Kasurun longhouse.

  When the airmen reached the longhouse, Makahanap led them up the notched log onto the veranda and sat down with them across from the Long Kasurun longhouse chief, who, after the ritual exchange of greetings, told the D.O. how he had sheltered two of the foreigners the first night after they had fallen from the sky.

  Drawing on his days as a mission teacher, Makahanap managed to get across to the airmen in a mixture of gestures and with a few English and Dutch words—and the help of Phil's Dutch/Malay/English word list—that he was a government official and that he spoke Dutch and Malay but not English.

  He could sense the young foreigners' uneasiness. Perhaps his own doubts about the course of action he had embarked on were showing. He knew they must be hungry, and he had an idea how far the Dayaks' food was from the Americans' usual fare. With permission from the chief, he took food from the Lun Dayeh stores to prepare a meal of broiled spareribs, rice fried in pork fat, boiled pork and coffee with sugar. The airmen wolfed it down.